In June the year after they were married, two significant events occurred. The first: the birth of a son, Phillip. While their love confounded everyone, the fast following of a child surprised no one. The second event, while no less momentous, had a rather negating effect on the jubilation caused by the first. War had broken out in Europe the year before and as a colony Australia had swiftly followed the emperor into battle. France had just fallen to the Germans, and Albert, along with Pat and Eamonn Moriarty, Josh Craig, and Arthur Kelly enlisted with the AIF to fulfil their duty and save their motherlands from the Nazi scourge. All five of the men were enlisted as part of the 9th Division and hurriedly packaged off to undergoing arms and combat training in Egypt. Pat, Josh and Arthur never returned.
Upon his return Albert would stand at night, unable to sleep; a silhouette against he blue-black sky, haunted by ghosts unknown. While he was not the most socially adventurous of men before leaving, after returning he recluded back into his own mind even more. There were things he wouldn’t talk about; things he would rather consign to the dustbin of his mind than to bring up and talk about, even with Sarah. She offered an open invitation to him to talk about it whenever he was ready, but never forced the issue, allowing instead for him to work through his demons on his own, at night, with me.
Some nights he would stay for hours just standing, sitting, leaning against my naked skin, talking or not talking. Often he would fall asleep amongst the rocks and bracken that sheltered my roots, waking to the soft padding of kangaroos heading down to the dam to quench their thirst.
Many of the stories he would tell do not bear repeating, and nothing would be gained from me doing so in detail. It is perhaps suffice to say that Albert saw and went through things that no person should ever have the indignity or misfortune to go through. He survived shrapnel wounds and a bullet graze, but worse than these the mental scars of bombs exploding all around in the darkness of the night, not knowing where the next one would land, where the next bullet would come from, the slow and protracted deaths of his closest mates in the trenches alongside him, and the constant gnawing consideration that he could be the next one to go. He held his brother-in-law in his arms as blood bubbled from the hole in his lung. Hell populated his nightmares; ghosts of comrades stalked his dreams. If he didn’t sleep he didn’t have to confront them and explain how he had survived yet they had not.
In public he and Eamonn would tell their stories of the siege of Tobruk, laughing along to the comedy of Lord Haw-Haw extolling the virtues of surrender to their longevity and his derogatory dubbing of them as ‘Rats’, which in the Australian spirit was immediately taken on as a badge of honour- The Rats of Tobruk- and soon became a part of Australian folklore, playing chicken against each other as the Messerschmitt’s buzzed and fired on them with machine guns, winning the Allies first major battle of the war at El Alamein. They adopted these stories of self-deprecating bravado as their truth, leaving their mythology unchallenged for fear of either appearing cowardly or causing offense.
Eamonn managed to successfully hide behind these tales and reacclimatise into life in Paradise. Yes he suffered as any man would have suffered, but he managed to disguise his pain from others, or else drown it with beer when things all became a little bit too much for him. While Albert tried to hide also, his veneer of triumph was much less convincing and people took to avoiding any reference- direct or not- to the war whilst he was around, preferring instead to limit the scope of their conversations with him strictly to farming, weather and the future, all the while whispering behind his back about how he had changed from how he was before the war.
But life continued, as it always does, in its own intractable way, and as they always say, time heals all wounds. It was a slow and turbulent process of cycles of bleeding, clotting, infection, inflammation, suppuration, contraction, and remodelling, and the scars would always remain clear and evident, but Albert’s mind was gradually brought back from the brink of madness and onto restoring his farm, his love for his wife and son. The busyness of running the farm diverted his focus from his memories and greatly aided his recovery.
By the end of the war Albert had reinstated some sort of routine back into his life and had tidied his and his parents farms back to how they had been before his departure. He even managed to scrape together enough money from his army wage to buy the Craig’s farm when they sold up and left out of grief over the loss of their son.
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